The Screengrab : pam grier

Precursors: Mars Attacks! (1996)

Nick Schager — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The answer to combating an alien invasion is misfit monsters in this week’s aptly titled Monsters vs. Aliens, a DreamWorks animated trifle that, for all its innocuous good humor, has little on Tim Burton’s screwy homage to ‘50s E.T. sagas, Mars Attacks! With more than a dash of Dr. Strangelove mixed into its silly period-sci-fi stew, Burton’s film concerns the unexpected arrival of spacemen intent on incinerating with ray-guns all of humanity – and cackling like little schoolchildren as they do it. The president (Jack Nicholson, in one of two roles) is at the head of a lunatic cabinet, a former heavyweight champ (Jim Brown) is determined to ditch his Egyptian-themed hotel gig and reunite with his wife (Pam Grier) and kids, and a Kansas teen (Lukas Haas) tasked with caring for granny winds up at the forefront of the interspecies fight, three of the many threads Burton casts with all-stars and crams into his overstuffed plot. Mars Attacks! isn’t often riotous but its postmodern use of ‘50s aesthetics in a clearly present day (circa 1996) setting proves both strangely natural and striking, as does its stabs at surreally wacko imagery, from the opening shot of cattle on fire running down a street, to the appearance of the Martians’ UFO armada. And while Burton’s satiric skewering is scattershot at best, the uninhibited madcap energy of his tribute-cum-big-budget-blockbuster nonetheless frequently makes it more amusing and inspired than that of the cheesy ‘50s B-movies (and bloated ‘90s summertime action-sagas) on which it deliriously riffs.

Screengrab Presents: Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

PAM GRIER in JACKIE BROWN (1997)

I suppose this one doesn’t entirely count as a comeback, since the former blaxploitation star of urban classics like Coffy and Foxy Brown has yet to land another starring role as meaty as Jackie Brown, the drug-mule stewardess who outsmarts both her murderous boss (Samuel Jackson) and the feds on her tail before riding off into the sunset with a suitcase of cash in Quentin Tarantino’s underrated adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. Then again, hardly any actresses (especially those of, ahem, a certain age) get to star in major motion pictures as realistically smart, complex, vulnerable women like Jackie, who succeed not with machine guns or sex (although there’s plenty of that simmering just under the surface in Grier’s palpable chemistry with Robert Forster, as bail bondsman Max Cherry, Jackie’s reluctant partner in crime -- one of the great screen couples of all time), but rather through believably human ingenuity and courage. Yet, at the very least, Grier finally earned some overdue respect as an actress from those who’d previously looked down on her B-movie roots, and though she didn’t win an Oscar for her Oscar-worthy career best performance, she at least caught a second wind in her career as a character actress, with relatively high-profile gigs like Jane Campion's Holy Smoke and The L Word...though, come to think of it, maybe it's time for yet another Pam Grier comeback so those of us without Showtime can maybe see her a little more often.

ROBERT ALTMAN, THE PLAYER (1992)

The rise and fall and rise of Robert Altman is well-known to movie geeks, but no list of great cinematic comebacks would be complete without a nod to the director who rose to prominence during the anything goes, lunatics-running-the-asylum ‘70s era of American filmmaking, when Uncle Bob churned out a head-spinning number of modern day classics like M*A*S*H and Nashville before biting the Hollywood hand that fed him one too many times and getting banished to the wilderness, only to raise his career from the dead once again by chomping down even harder on that very same Hollywood hand. After foolishly viewing film as a creative means of expression (rather than the branding mechanism and product placement delivery system we now know it to be), Altman was kicked to the curb by the powers-that-be once the Suits reasserted corporate control of the studios in the early eighties. Not only was Altman an idealistic pothead who wouldn’t know a high-concept Eddie Murphy vehicle if it bit him in the ass, but he was OLD, a condition the New Hollywood power elite feared might be contagious. Yet even in exile, Altman found a way to keep on keepin' on: he was an early adapter of cheap, indie video technology, which he used to keep his director-fu sharp with adaptations of stage plays like Secret Honor and prescient experiments like the political fictumentary Tanner ’88, all of which helped him to eventually reboot his career thanks to an independent film about Hollywood full of cameos by old friends and (at least according to Wikipedia) unpaid stars who just happened to show up at the L.A. locations where Altman was shooting and agreed to improvise some lines. The Player, a critical and financial success, was nominated for an “all-is-forgiven” Oscar that gave Altman the clout to work fairly steadily for the remainder of his life, generating both hits (Short Cuts, Gosford Park) and misses (Prêt-à-Porter, Kansas City)...any one of which remains far more interesting and unique today than all the Transformers in Toy Town.

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS in GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)

In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, Daniel Day-Lewis developed a reputation as one of the world's finest and most versatile actors, due in no small part to the exhaustive amount of work he put into his characterizations. Eventually, the work began to take its toll, and following 1997's The Boxer, Day-Lewis took an extended sabbatical from acting. After five years pursuing various interests (like spending time with his family, not to mention those strange rumors about an apprenticeship with an Italian cobbler) Day-Lewis was finally lured back into the business by his onetime collaborator, Martin Scorsese. Once on board, Day-Lewis threw himself completely into the role of Bill "The Butcher" Cutting as he had with his other great performances, going so far as to speak in the character's voice even when he wasn't on the set. The result was a Day-Lewis performance completely unlike any he'd given before, making Bill a ferocious villain who rules the city by virtue of being the most ruthless monster to prowl the streets. Yet what makes the performance truly scary is his unpredictability, whether he's menacing his former lover with a set of throwing knives ("whoopsie-daisy!"), tap-tap-tapping a dagger against his glass eye, or standing over the body of a man he's just killed with a look-at-what-I-just-did smirk on his face. Day-Lewis has often spoken about how each performance makes him feel uneasy about whether he'll ever act again, and with such single-minded devotion to his craft it's little wonder that he feels that way. Yet it's also this devotion, coupled with Day-Lewis' genius, that makes each of his performances feel like a gift, and we undoubtedly have Scorsese to thank for making his subsequent performances -- including his towering turn as Daniel "Draaaaaaaaaaaaaaainage!" Plainview- possible. And you say his next movie is a musical? We can't wait.

ALEC BALDWIN in THE COOLER (2003)

When Alec Baldwin turned up in a supporting role in the 2003 Mike Myers vehicle The Cat in the Hat, reviewer David Edelstein wrote that, "The movie's grim subtext is the wreck of Baldwin's career — how puffy he looks, and how he never manages to rise above his material." One week later, The Cooler opened, and Baldwin was on his way to Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his smooth, multilayered performance as a Las Vegas casino operator who, to his surprise and despair, discovers that he does actually have a heart. Baldwin had always been something of an odd man out among Hollywood A-listers, a classic example of a character actor in a leading man's body: he seemed a little dull trying to play the action hero (The Hunt for Red October, The Shadow) or lover boy (Prelude to a Kiss) but seemed happily liberated whenever he got a crack at playing psychos (Miami Blues, The Juror) or scumbags (State and Main). His role in The Cooler was a personal breakthrough because it gave him the chance to play a scumbag (with psycho tendencies) who had the depth to find himself conflicted, and also to show off both his comic and dramatic chops to a new degree, leading indirectly to his full-blown career renaissance on TV's 30 Rock.

MARTIN LANDAU in TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM (1988)

Landau, whose attention-getting performance as the assistant baddie in North by Northwest was followed by several seasons as the master of disguise on TV's Mission: Impossible, never flew as high in his early movie career as some of the names on this list, but he managed to fall farther than just about any of the others anyway. After leaving Mission: Impossible in a contract dispute and taking his wife and co-star Barbara Bain with him, Landau spent fifteen or so years adrift in horror and sci-fi pictures barely worthy of the name, as well as such august TV productions as The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island and The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. Somehow, Coppola decided to throw him a lifeline when he was casting his long-deferred dream project about the car designer Preston Tucker, and Landau's performance -- a shaft of cranky warmth cutting like a light saber through a hollow movie, coming from an actor with a semi-familiar name but with a face so changed since the last time most viewers had seen him that he was all but unrecognizable -- is the only thing fondly remembered from that picture. Landau got an Oscar nomination and a leading role in Woody Allen's 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors. He eventually did win an Oscar, for playing the washed-up, half-crazed Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994). Speaking about that performance later, he was quick to give credit to his own years in the show business wilderness; they'd given him a pretty good idea of what Lugosi had gone through.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:30:00 GMT

SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG IS THANKFUL FOR:

BILLY LIAR (1963)

Billy Fisher is a young man with a well-developed fantasy life and a rather disappointing real one. He lives in some unfun industrial Northern town in drab post-war England. Life after graduation is not all it was cracked up to be — despite working at a funeral parlor that hawks plastic coffins and having two fiancés, plus a girl on the side — Billy still lives with parents and grandmother. His closet is stuffed with calendars pilfered from work and unpublished manuscripts. In his spare time he escapes to his own private dictatorship where he is a leader-war hero and adoring citizens greet him with a "left-handed salute." He also dreams of moving to London to work as a scriptwriter, but doesn't seem to be able to get it together sufficiently to leave. A young and beautiful Julie Christie assures him, "It's easy, you get on a train, then four hours later you are there." Billy is not convinced. I saw this movie when I was about 16 and couldn't wait to get out of the European satellite town I lived in. Like some of the best pop music to come out of England, Billy Liar told me that I was not alone and that others had felt my pain. For this I am thankful.

FOXY BROWN (1974)

I saw Foxy Brown at an underground film festival in my hometown, I think I was in my late teens. Despite the rather ramshackle storyline and low production value I fell in love. Hard. There is this one scene where Pam Grier is getting dressed and ready for business. She's all fierce hotness and a little bit of one of her ample boobs is spilling out underneath her bra. She looks amazingly strong and sexy, but not so perfect that you cannot relate. Meanwhile she is stuffing razor blades into her Afro in order to prepare for a fight. As a teenage girl not particularly happy with the state of things in the world, Foxy Brown impressed me. She has a good job and a useless little brother. She knows no one was going to look out for her if she didn't do it herself. In short, she kept it together in a world that did its best to break her. This was a woman to follow. Over the course of the movie she is bruised, battered, raped and nearly killed. But she is a lady all the way and ultimately she comes out on top. Jack Hill wrote the script, but the movie would be nothing without Pam Grier. Thank you, Pam.

THE GRADUATE (1967)

There are few truths in life that aren't dealt with in The Graduate: love, aging, quashed dreams, generational strife, loneliness. It's a great movie to begin with and gets better with each viewing. (I should know, given that I've seen it upwards of fifteen times.) I think I may have started out just liking the story and the exquisite cinematography. Somewhat later I identified with poor Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) and his existential angst. (Who doesn't?) Now, as I begin to enjoy high balls and have accumulated more than my fair share of animal print clothing, I have shifted to feeling more kinship with Mrs. Robinson, Benjamin's aging paramour. She once was an art history major, but after getting knocked up by Mr. Robinson, her life took a more prosaic course than the one she hoped for. Now, she and Ben are two outsiders with vaguely artistic aspirations, too dark and severe for the sunny Southern California they inhabit. In short, The Graduate is like a Nina Simone compilation, the bible, or a nice flask; It'll help you through just about any situation.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark & Leonard Pierce

Contributor: Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

PAM GRIER (1949 - )

She was the undisputed queen of black '70s cinema. In tight pants, high heels and with razor blades in her Afro, Pam Grier burned up the screen in movies like Foxy Brown and Coffy. Independent black cinema fell on hard times by the end of that decade and she did not make the leap over to the Hollywood mainstream. For years she worked smaller film roles and TV here and there. That is, until Quentin Tarantino cast her in what might have been his — and her — best film ever, Jackie Brown. There Pam plays a middle-aged woman, a struggling air-hostess, slightly frayed at the edges but tough as nails...and what a sight to see.

SOPHIA LOREN (1934 - )

In pure feminine power and deliciousness, few can rival Sophia Loren in her glory years. It is hard to believe now, but the first lady of Italian film actually made her way onto the screen after fellow Italian bombshell Gina Lollobrigida. In fact she was discovered by (and subsequently married, then split with) Carlo Ponti, who also launched Lollobrigida's carreer. While works of Talmudic length could be written on Loren's looks, she's no mean actress. Get thee to a video store for Two Women or El Cid to appreciate her in the fullest.

ANNE BANCROFT (1931-2005)

Born Anna Maria Italiano in the Bronx, she followed that age-old tradition of taking a more WASPy sounding stage name. Anne Bancroft will, however, always be Mrs. Robinson to us. There are more prolific actresses out there, but you can't deny the power of her performance as a beautiful, sad, alcoholic older woman to Dustin Hoffman's younger man in The Graduate. Now that we are sniffing thirty ourselves we realize that (A) Mrs. Robinson wasn't supposed to be particularly old in the movie and (B) at 36, Anne Bancroft was only a few years older than Hoffman. In any case, leopard print never looked so good. And never did a lady lead with so much out-of-control control. It isn't easy to top one of the best movies of all time and nothing Bancroft did after that (no, not even being the voice of the Queen in Antz) made the same splash. Mel Brooks married her, though, so you know she was special.

SHIRLEY MACLAINE (1934 - )

My first Shirley MacLaine memory: sitting in front of my parents' stereo (approximately the size of the desk I'm sitting at now), playing my mother's copy of the Sweet Charity soundtrack and staring intently at the redhead on the album cover. I may have only been six or seven years old, but I had good taste. I lost track of Shirley after that, until she resurfaced as the kook on Larry King talking about her past lives in Atlantis and her UFO frequent-flier miles, just another Hollywood punchline. What a cad I was, forgetting what a beautiful thing we had there in front of the stereo all those years ago. But it all came back to me when I finally got around to seeing the work that made her famous in the first place. In her trademark roles – The Apartment, Irma la Douce, Sweet Charity and especially Some Came Running, she's pixie-cute, charming, funny, sometimes annoying and ultimately heartbreaking. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress five times, finally winning for Terms of Endearment. In 1993, I saw her open for Frank Sinatra at the Worcester Centrum; her show-stopper was, of course, "If My Friends Could See Me Now." I'd be lying if I said she looked like she'd stepped right off that long-ago album cover, but I will tell you she still had the gams.

CLAUDIA JENNINGS (1949-1979)

If such redneck romps as Gator Bait, Truck Stop Women and Moonshine County Express aren't part of your cinematic education, you may not have even heard of Claudia Jennings, but in the mid-1970s she was the queen of the drive-in, the ultimate hick chick. Born Mary Eileen Chesterson in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jennings studied dramatic arts as a child and performed with the Hull House theater company in Chicago after graduating high school. She took a day job as a receptionist for Playboy magazine, where her knockout looks did not go unnoticed. She posed for the magazine in 1969 and again in 1970, when she was named Playmate of the Year. Moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting, she landed a supporting role in the 1972 roller derby flick Unholy Rollers. Her role in 1974's Truck Stop Woman, in which she hijacked trucks using sex as her primary weapon, became the model for the rest of Jennings' leading roles: drop-dead gorgeous, sexually uninhibited and tough enough to take on the big boys. Long before Thelma and Louise hit the road, Jennings and Jocelyn Jones played a sexy pair of bank-robbing outlaws in The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. In Gator Bait, Jennings is a bayou woman turned Death Wish-style vigilante after her little sister is murdered by depraved hillbillies. A decade before Sigourney Weaver's supposedly groundbreaking turn in Aliens, Jennings was already kicking ass and taking names – and doing it in the tightest, tiniest pair of Daisy Dukes possible. Her final performance came in David Cronenberg's little-seen 1979 racing picture, Fast Company – ironic, in that Jennings was killed in an auto accident on the Pacific Coast Highway that year, a couple of months shy of her thirtieth birthday. Her cinematic legacy may be a minor one, but in the realm of the hick flick, Claudia Jennings still reigns.

MICHELLE PFEIFFER (1958 - )

Although it wasn't her first movie, most filmgoers got their first good gawk at Pfeiffer in the 1983 Scarface. Although opinions were mixed (and would remain so for a while) about whether she could act, the camera loved her, and the way she embraced the role of the world's surliest cokehead gangster's moll established that she wasn't persnickety about wanting to be liked. Any doubts about her acting had been pretty much cleared up by the time of Dangerous Liasons, in which she was excellent in one of the film's major roles that was probably the least fun to play. That movie and her other 1988 releases, Married to the Mob and Tequila Sunrise, made it clear that likability itself was comfortably within her range. Her singing sexpot in The Fabulous Baker Boys was pure starshine, her alienated early '60s runaway housewife in Love Field a terrific stretch, and with all due respect to Julie Newmar, her Catwoman gave the most insouciant reading of the line "Meow!" on record. Her movies have gotten worse, and her last one, I Could Never Be Your Man. ended up going straight to DVD. But she remains a welcome presence on-screen.

ANNA MAGNANI (1908-1973)

If Sophia Loren could have taken out a patent on the movie image of the Italian woman as lusty, ripe, and sensual, Magnani embodied the idea of the Italian as a woman who might have stepped off an opera stage, made of common clay but transcendently beautiful in a way that represents what people used to call "a force of nature." She had been acting in movies (and also singing and performing in cabaret and nightclubs) since the earliest days of sound pictures, but it was Roberto Rossellini's 1945 Open City, and in particular her death scene, that made her an international star. She continued to work in Europe with such directors as Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti (Bellissima), and Jean Renoir, who after using her in The Golden Coach proclaimed her the greatest actress he'd ever worked with. Hollywood never quite knew just what to do with her, but she did find something of a patron in Tennessee Williams, and she won an Oscar for the film version of The Rose Tattoo. Magnani once said that "Women like me can only submit to men capable of dominating them, and I have never found anyone capable of dominating me," and in that movie you can see what she meant: she looks at her co-star, Burt Lancaster, as if he were Arnold Stang. (She was apparently perceived as a bit much even by her co-star in The Fugitive Kind -- the ill-fated screen version of Williams' Orpheus Descending -- a shy, retiring fellow named Marlon Brando. "Every time I play a scene with her," Brando is supposed to have said, "I'm gonna have a rock in each hand.") Her death in Rome, at the age of 65 from pancreatic cancer, occasioned a public funeral ceremony rumored to have made the Pope jealous.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

After the big screen edition of Sex & The City exceeded the low expectations of industry gurus who were shocked...shocked...to discover that people were actually interested in a movie about, y'know, gurlz, Missy Schwartz wrote a depressingly familiar story for Entertainment Weekly: “It was an unqualified triumph...one the industry observed in a stunned, slack-jawed state. As the weekend rolled to a close, news outlets filed their reports with words like unexpected, surprising, and shocking. ‘What do you know?’ they all seemed to be saying. ‘Women go to the movies!’”

And if Sex and the City 2 (or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 or Mama Mia!) or any other female-centric movie succeeds in the near future, Hollywood will be surprised all over again, and Entertainment Weekly and other publications will run similar articles about the American movie-going public’s "unexpected," "surprising" and "shocking" desire for strong female characters...a desire Hollywood will more or less continue to ignore as it continues its relentless pursuit of teenage boys, no matter how many Speed Racers crash and burn along the way.

Because, after all, many studio execs are just overgrown boys themselves. They dig gadgets, explosions and special effects, and CGI creations are easy to control and merchandise. Female-centered movies tend to rely on well-written screenplays, relatable characters, nuanced direction and...yecccch...feelings: all the things most studio execs pretend to champion but secretly hate.

But we here at The Screengrab aren’t afraid to get in touch with our feminine sides as we raise our Cosmos to these Top Ten “chick hits”: films that put their empowered female characters front and center (without resorting to stripper poles OR big gauzy Prince Charming/Bridezilla wedding porn).

THELMA AND LOUISE (1991)

Okay, so I’m not sure how empowering it is to drive off a cliff in real life, but this Ridley Scott film (based on an iconic script by wunderkind, zeitgeist-tapping Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri) caused a sensation upon its release by (A) objectifying Brad Pitt as a hunky slab of beefcake (thus electrifying and pretty much launching his career) and (B) allowing Susan Sarandon’s Louise to gun down the scumbag who was raping Geena Davis’ Thelma (and later blow up the truck of a leering male chauvinist pig) without even feeling all that bad about it, just like any number of male actors in any number of male-centric revenge fantasies...except in films like Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Taxi Driver, etc., the male heroes didn’t have to die in the end to satisfy Hays Code-style notions of karmic retribution for stepping outside the lines of acceptable social conduct. Still, the film’s outlaw motif energized female audiences by (melo)dramatizing the common stereotypical perception of men as either (a) dangerous assholes or (b) hapless boobs while providing enough action and sex to attract audiences of every gender.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006)

There’s a beloved feminist koan that goes something like this: ruthless, aggressive men who go after what they want are called winners, while ruthless, aggressive women are called bitches. Of course, most thinking people realize that ruthless, aggressive men are actually called assholes...and it’s the universal, gender-blind nature of the eternally confusing success vs. happiness equation faced by Anne Hathaway’s aspiring fashionista “Andy” Sachs that helped to make the film version of The Devil Wears Prada a $300 million dollar monster hit. And, let’s see...two seconds of Googling and...yep! There’s a TMZ article from 2006 with a, shall we say, certain familiar ring to it: “Blah blah blah, female-centered film exceeded all expectations...yadda-yadda-yadda...industry analysts surprised,” etc., etc. etc. As Meryl Streep’s formidable Gordon Gekko-in-stilettos magazine mogul Miranda Priestly might say to those industry Suits who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the existence of fifty percent of their audience, “Details of your incompetence do not interest me.”

BRING IT ON (2000)

This broadly played late-summer sleeper is actually packing a lot of heavy metaphorical lumber for a teen flick about a cheerleading competition. Kirsten Dunst is the new head of the Toros, who cheer for the (rich, white) Rancho Carne High School in Los Angeles; they're gearing up for the national championships, which they've won the past six years with the spectacular routines provided by departing team leader Big Red. But when a new girl with a gymnastics background and an attitude -- Eliza Dushku, who was too cool for Buffy the Vampire Slayer's school -- joins the squad, she has unsettling news. It turns out that Big Red was stealing her plays from the fly girls who cheer for the (black, poor) East Compton Clovers, thus making the Toros the cheerleading equivalent of Pat Boone to the Clovers' Little Richard. Dunst actually does her best to rationalize this cultural parasitism rather than destroy her cheerleading institution overnight, but the situation becomes intolerable after the Clovers attend a Toros game and mock their blonde plagiarists by performing the stolen moves in the stands. In the end, both teams attend the finals and show that they can use their brains and talents to compete honorably on the field of battle. There is, however, one scene that shows that contemporary standards of empowerment may be thornier, and weirder, than is commonly acknowledged. Dunst offers the Clovers, who have been prevented from attending the national competition by financial hardship, the chance to come by talking her father into getting his company to sponsor them, but the head Clover (Gabrielle Union) contemptuously rejects the offer, telling Dunst that they don't need her charity; they'll raise the money themselves, their own way. Their own way turns out to be going on an "Oprah"-like TV show and raising contributions by guilt-tripping viewers with their tale of woe. I guess it's honest labor and not charity if it helps "Oprah" kill an hour.

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Such '70s blaxploitation films as Coffy and Foxy Brown may have made Pam Grier a cult star, but it was always a degraded form of stardom, and not just because the movies were cheap genre knockoffs; she may have had the chance to show that she could hold the camera and kick ass in the final reel, but she still also had to get her top ripped off before being raped by guys who looked like the Ku Klux Klan's answer to Uncle Fester, while being called things like "this big-jugged jigaboo." Jackie Brown catches up with Grier more than twenty years down the road, when she's at an age when Hollywood regards actresses as disposable. It's not a great age to be a flight attendant, either, which is why Jackie is working for a low-grade Mexican airline and acting as a courier for Los Angeles-based gun dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Both Ordell and the federal agents setting up a case against him regard Jackie as a pawn who can easily be taken out of play at any moment. But -- and here's the key difference between this and Grier's '70s vehicles -- the movie respects her. The way she looks through Tarantino's lens, you sort of picture the camera shuffling its feet nervously as it tries to work up the nerve to ask her if she's been seeing anybody lately. And so Ordell, whose fearsomeness would cut him a lot more ice in a different Tarantino movie, is reduced to a comic figure; for all his bluster and firepower, his assumption that the middle-aged black woman with the low-paying job must be a bit player (which Jackie will use against him, and against the feds, too), makes him ridiculous. The only man in the movie who can see Jackie for what she is remains Robert Forster's bail bondsman Max Cherry, who, unlike the film's younger, strutting cocks, lacks the ego and capacity for self-deception that might get in the way of his seeing clearly what's in front of him. Tarantino included a riff (borrowed from Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes) on the arrogance of Superman in the second Kill Bill film, and Jackie Brown is in some ways a black, female Superman fantasy, except that Jackie doesn't have to put on a pair of eyeglasses to trick the dull-witted into thinking she's no match for them.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Long before Joss Whedon was a small-screen institution, he was just a fresh-faced young script doctor with a dream. That dream was to create a richly detailed fantasy world featuring nubile teenage girls. Sure, you’re saying: how does that make him any different than millions of other guys? Here’s how: his nubile teenage girls kicked ass. And not just any ass, but demonic vampire ass! Within a decade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would find its way onto television and prove a major cult hit, giving the country a brand new definition of girl power and adding an entirely new dimension to teen angst as Buffy Summers and her Scoobies battled monsters and bloodsuckers at Sunnydale High. But it all started with this low-budget big-screen number. Whedon, once he’d decided he was a highbrow auteur, more or less disavowed the Buffy movie, but in many ways, it holds up a lot better than people give it credit for: it doesn’t take itself so deadly serious, it has tons of terrific comic turns from Paul Reubens and Stephen Root in supporting roles, and while Kristy Swanson’s Buffy may not carry the emotional weight that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s did, she looks mighty fine in a half-shirt, and she furthers the cause of female empowerment the way only a vampire slayer can. She’s rough, she’s tough, and she maintains her keen fashion sense: what could be more feminine than that?

Click here for Part Two!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Videos of the Day: Coffy vs. Foxy Brown

Paul Clark — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As I wrote previously, Professor Brian O’Blivion’s All-New Flesh for Memorial Day Film (and TV) Quiz is now in full swing at Dennis Cozzalio’s blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. And while many of you have no doubt completed Professor O’Blivion’s exam in a timely manner, I also realize that some (including yours truly) may be taking longer to finish. No doubt some of you are having trouble with some of the questions, and could probably use a bit of a refresher course for some of them.

One I’ve had a bit of a problem with was one of Dennis’ infamous comparison questions, this one relating to two of Pam Grier’s most famous roles. Yes, I was confounded by four simple words: “Foxy Brown or Coffy?” Now, I love me some Pam Grier, but it’s just been so long since I’ve watched either of these that I had some trouble distinguishing between them, and I’d imagine I’m not the only one having trouble. So I did a little research into the question and decided to share my findings with you, for the benefit of all those having trouble.

First, the similarities. Both films are directed by Jack Hill and feature, along with Grier, the one and only Sid Haig. And both films star Grier as a badass who sets out to clean up the streets as revenge for harm done to someone close to her. However, in Coffy the wronged party is her sister, whereas in Foxy Brown it’s her boyfriend who’s the victim. Likewise, in Coffy she’s a nurse, whereas Foxy Brown doesn’t elaborate on her daytime career. And finally, Coffy is one of Quentin Tarantino’s all-time favorite films, whereas Foxy Brown costars Huggy Bear.

Does that help any? If not, check out the trailers. Maybe that’ll do the trick. First, Coffy:

And now, Foxy Brown:

As far as trailers go, Foxy Brown wins hands down- it’s funnier, funkier, and just a blast to watch, while Coffy’s is more conventional and kind of bland. And if there’s one thing Pam Grier could never be, it’s bland. Anyway, I’m still a little unsure of how I’ll answer the question (maybe I’ll be a smartass and answer with “Black Mama, White Mama”), but either way, I’m looking forward to revisiting some blaxploitation classics in the near future.

The Rep Report: April 3 - 9

Phil Nugent — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

CHICAGO: "No Borders, No Limits: 1960s Nikkatsu Action Cinema" (April 5--May 23) at the Gene Siskel Film Center presents eight films from the vaults of Nikkatsu Studios, a crowd-pleasing outfit that in the '60s specialized in gaudy, glamorously stylized action flicks: yakuza films, police thrillers, youth-exploitation melodramas. Long shut out of serious discussion of Japanese cinema, the studio's output is largely unknown in the West outside of the work of the gonzo cult hero Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter, et al). The program eschews Suzuki's work in favor of what, at least for American audiences, are total obscurities with such titles as A Colt Is My Passport, Gangster V.I.P., Velvet Hustler, The Warped Ones, and the "Eastern Western" Plains Wanderer. Grady Hendrix describes this "liberating blast of hot cigarette smoke and cool, jet-set jazz" as "Japan’s version of the French New Wave, except bleaker, more stylish, and aiming primarily to entertain rather than enlighten.”

BERKELEY: On April 3, Pacific Film Archives hosts something called "Cine/Spin", with this description: "Some people might consider it sacrilegious to let live DJs run music over a sound film by Luis Buñuel, but it’s hard to be more sacrilegious than Simon of the Desert already is." Yeah, whatever. Still, Simon, which clocks in at a brisk forty-odd minutes, is both one of Bunuel's best films and one of his least-screened, and I assume they'll show it with subtitles, so if nothing else, stick some cotton in your eyes and make the trek.

BOSTON: From 10:00 A.M. Saturday, April 5, until 11:00 AM Sunday, the Brattle hosts its second annual "Schlock-Around-the-Clock Movie Marathon" ("13 hours of cheese!), The schedule is still being assembled, but among the promised attractions are Poor White Trash, the hillbilly exploitation flick best remembered for the great character freak Timothy Carey's unclassifiable, lust-driven hoedown, Jack Hill's The Big Bird Cage with Pam Grier, and a personal appearance by Ms. Grier herself.

Reviving Richard Fleischer: "Violent Saturday" and "Mandingo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The director Richard Fleischer, who died a couple of years ago at the age of 89, had a long career, an immaculate bloodline (as the son and nephew of Max and Dave Fleischer, the animators behind the great short films starring Betty Boop, Superman, and Popeye), and no critical reputation to speak of. Fleischer's vast filmography is all over the map in terms of subject matter and style, and his name is attached to a number of big commercial disasters (Dr. Dolittle, Tora! Tora! Tora!) and minor embarassments (Che!, an attempt by 20th-Century Fox to cash in on '60s revolutionary youth, starring Omar Sharif in the title role and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro; The Jazz Singer, starring Neil Diamond, with Laurence Olivier as his chagrinned poppa; Red Sonja with Brigitte Nielsen) that are unified mainly by their lack of personality. But he's begun to attract defenders, and Dave Kehr, for one, thinks it's surprising that he "still has not been given a major New York retrospective." As it happens, three of Fleisher's movies are enjoying return engagements on the New York revival circuit in the days and weeks to come. Violent Saturday (1955), which plays for a week at Film Forum starting February 29, is one of those odd film noirs where the thugs from the city hit the highway and track their mud all over the clean, open fields of the American heartland. Written by Sidney Boehm, who also did the script for The Big Heat, it serves up Lee Marvin as the nastiest of a trio of bank robbers who impose their bad morals and worse manners on a quiet little town where they may fit in a little than the locals want to admit. It was made the same year as James Sturges' better-known rural thriller Bad Day at Black Rock, where Marvin and Ernest Borgnine both served as muscle for the local forces of darkness. Borgnine is in this one, too, but cast against type as an Amish farmer who has understandable cause to worry that his religious proscription against violence may not be strong enough to survive its encounter with Lee Marvin. The film, which enjoyed a brief period of revival and acclaim in the mid-80s when it was discovered by critics and used as a club against Peter Weir's tonier Witness, is a reminder of how well Fleischer's no-frills filmmaking technique worked when applied to simple but gimmicky thriller material, as in the 1952 The Narrow Margin and Armored Car Robbery, both testaments to the grip of nuts-and-bolts noir and the nut-cracking sturdiness of Charles McGraw's jawline.

The "Film Comments Selects" series at Walter Reade Theater is showing Fleischer's 1971 10 Rillington Place on February 21 and 24, thus giving audiences the chance to see the director of Gandhi, Richard Attenborough, sweat up the screen as a serial killer who strangled eight women and left it to an innocent fellow played by John Hurt to be hanged in his place. But the real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here may be the chance to see the 1975 Mandingo (screening on February 23) on a big screen, assuming that no one tears it down before the closing credits roll. This anti-Gone with the Wind, set on a Southern slave-breeding plantation presided over by James Mason, was made in 1975 from a script by Norman Wexler, the ad executive turned wild man screenwriter who wrote Joe and Serpico. (Wexler, who reportedly served as a model for Andy Kaufman's loathsome lounge-singer character Tony Clifton, was notorious for such stunts as blowing off a man trying to make conversation with him on a commercial airplane flight by telling him that he was on his way to assassinate President Nixon. Wexler's seatmate notified a flight attendant, who in turn notified the FBI, and when the plane landed, Wexler wound up having to talk to a lot of people he would rather have not talked to.)

Kehr takes the position that "Mandingo is Fleischer’s last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system." This is a very interesting take on the picture, though some will feel that it may amount to putting a little too much thought into a movie that climaxes with Perry King reacting to the news that his wife (Susan George) has been having an affair with his prize slave, played by the heavyweight champ Ken Norton--King finds out the hard way, after his wife has given birth--by sticking Norton into a boiling cauldron and jabbing him with a pitchfork. But however seriously you end up taking Mandingo, it's definitely one of a kind, and very entertaining, if you can handle the fact that Eric Cartman would question its political correctness. (I remember that it was briefly on rotation on HBO around the time that my high school buddies first got cable, and for a long time, they were much taken with King's line, "I fancied her, so I bought her! She's gonna be my bed wench!" I can promise you, however, that use of this line in the real world got them no action whatsoever.) Devotees of hambone turns will want to see it just for the great James Mason drawling his lines, sitting with his bare feet on a black kid's tummy (it's supposed to be good for the arthritis), and generally giving the kind of performance that gives one visions of the star constantly asking the director, "Now, that last take, you're just going to show it for laughs at the wrap party and then burn the negative, right?" There was actually a sort of sequel to Mandingo called Drum, and it had a script that Wexler had worked on and a cast headed by Warren Oates, Pam Grier, and Yaphet Kotto, who you might think would raise the stakes a bit from Perry King, Susan George, and Ken Norton, but it had none of the, um, magic of the original, and is beloved by no one. Fleischer didn't direct it. So maybe he's some kind of auteur after all.

Our 11 Favorite Romantic Moments in the Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Max Cherry (Robert Forster) knows damn well he's not going to get the girl. He's not one of those idiots you meet in film noirs who feel some flicker of lust and start thinking that they can pull off some big score and get away and have it all; Max knows that whatever happens, he's going to end up back where he started, riding the deak at his bail bonds office, but in the meantime, he's prepared to do whatever he can to help Jackie (Pam Grier), because he figures he owes it to her, just for the way she made him feel the first time he laid eyes on her. He knows that she's out of his league, and he's okay with that; knowing that he could still feel that way is more than he expected to get out of one more trip to the jailhouse. What's amazing is that none of the other characters seem to see what Max sees when they look at Jackie: to them, she's just a middle-aged black woman, someone to be used and screwed over and forgotten. That's why they deserve the worst that can happen to them, and why Max deserves more than it would ever occur to him to ask for.

THE MORE THE MERRIER (1943)

Supernaturally avuncular matchmaker Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn, naturally) finally sees his plans come to fruition in this classic scene from George Stevens' comedy, More the Merrier. By trapping her dreary fiancé, Charles J. Pendergast, in a pointlessly prolonged meeting, genially uptight Constance Milligan (Jean Arthur) is forced to rely upon her inadvertent roommate and true love, hunky propeller designer Joe Stevens (Joel McCrea), to escort her back to her apartment on a warm summer night. As they make their way down the dark street, feeling the steam rising from other couples canoodling in the shadows, their conversation is all banal pleasantries on the surface, but McCrae's hands are in constant motion, laying Arthur's tiny jacket over her bare shoulders, kneading her hand in his (watch how gently he holds onto one of her fingers before letting her hand drop), guiding her forward with his hand pressed against the small of her back. Finally he dips her gently onto her front steps, draws her in close, kisses her hand, and, as she prattles on helplessly about the evaporating qualities of her former chosen one, he closes in for a deep, fatal neck nuzzle. She lifts her head, begins to stammer and is lost.

THEREMIN: AN ELECTRONIC ODYSSEY (1993)

This documentary tells the story of the Russian interventer Leon Theremin and his creation, in 1919, of the electronic musical instrument that bears his name. Although the theremin is best known in popular culture as the maker of spooky sounds in sci-fi movies (The Thing from Another World, The Day the Earth Stood Still) and freaky ones in pop songs such as the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations", Theremin intended it to revolutionize classical music, and he worked closely with Clara Rockmore (seen here playing "Romance"), the acknowledged supreme master of the instrument, to tinker and perfect his device according to her suggestions and specifications. In 1938, Theremin was scooped up by the KGB and disappeared from the public eye. For most of the movie, the viewer who doesn't know better is likely to assume that he was dead. But it turns out that Theremin was alive and kept busy by the Soviet government until the end of the Cold War — working, he says, on "different kinds of bad things" — and the filmmakers brought him to the States and arranged a reunion between the maestro and his favorite pupil, when both of them were in their nineties. For a minute, they just stand framed in the doorway, smiling at each other. Then Rockmore ushers him inside, and as she prepares to shut the door, she says to the camera crew, "You go now." Yes ma'am!

LAW OF DESIRE (1987)

In this ripe specimen of early Pedro Almodovar, twenty-six-year-old Antonio Banderas plays a fellow called, for convenience's sake, Antonio, who is attracted to the film and stage director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela), but isn't sure that he can have sex with another man. Pablo offers to take him home so they can figure it out together. Things go swimmingly, but the next morning, Antonio is totally, obsessively in love, but Pablo considers him a one-night stand. So, to get Pablo's attention, Antonio tracks down the guy that Pablo is in love with, throws him off a cliff, then finds Pablo's sister Tina, who used to be Pablo's brother, and Tina's niece (who was actually fathered, or mothered, or something, by her transexual ex-lover) and takes them hostage, yelling to the police who are soon surrounding the house that he'll give himself up if Pablo will consent to one more hour between the sheets. Pablo does consent, and after their hour together is up, Antonio, have known the touch of his love object once more, can walk into the police bullets feeling that his life has been fulfilled. In real life, this would be an unhappy situation for everybody involved and would require the combined services of Dr. Phil and S.W.A.T. In a movie, it is the Technicolor apotheosis of everyone's fantasy of doing whatever the hell it takes to convince the reluctant prospective partner that the two of you have to be together, and ultimately succeeding. In Almodovar's world, it probably counts as a slow news day.

BEFORE SUNSET (2004)

It's a safe bet that few people who watched backpacking Gen X-ers Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) spend a memorable night together in Vienna in 1995's Before Sunrise ever expected to see a sequel, much less wait nine years for one. When that follow-up finally did arrive in 2004, it could hardly have been confused with a traditional movie romance. As befitting a Richard Linklater film, their belated reunion in Paris is all talk — talk about missed connections, the impermanence of youth and the mysteries of love. Jesse has a flight to catch, so we're always aware of the ticking clock — that is, until the sublime final moments, when the urgency melts away to the appropriate tones of Nina Simone singing "Just in Time." Delpy does a shuffling little dance. Hawke sinks into the couch with a silly grin on his face. And we all learn that the most romantic words of all are not "I love you" — they're "Baby, you are gonna miss that plane."

— Phil Nugent, Robert Gomez, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 1.

The Top Ten Action Heroes Who Deserve A Comeback, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:30:00 GMT

This week's top ten comes to us from guest writer Gabriel Mckee, friend of Nerve and author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction. Read his fantastic blog here.

Recent years may well be remembered for bringing back the over-the-top action hero. New sequels to Rocky, Die Hard, and Rambo have revived long-dead franchises, and the trend is continuing. Indiana Jones 4 has started filming, and a fourth Mad Max film would have wrapped by now had scheduling conflicts not led director George Miller to make Happy Feet instead. Though it's an easy trend to mock, it opens the door for other action heroes to be resurrected — here are some top candidates.

10. Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris), The Delta Force

Before he was a meme, before he was Walker, Texas Ranger, even before he was a Karate Kommando, Chuck Norris was Maj. Scott McCoy of the Delta Force. This elite antiterrorist strike force, led by Lee Marvin, consists of some thirty soldiers who are highly trained in standing around in the back of a cargo plane while Chuck Norris rides around on a motorcycle killing terrorists. Delta Force came out in the pre-Die Hard world, before we expected our action heroes to have pathos, depth or family troubles. There's not much character to this character, but when it comes to straightforward ass-kicking, Norris is the undisputed master. Norris is ripe for a Stallone-style comeback, and in the and in the age of the War on Terror, a new entry in the Delta Force saga is the perfect vehicle for his revival.

9. Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy), Beverly Hills Cop

Remember when Eddie Murphy made movies that people enjoyed? Barring Dreamgirls, his film career has been on a losing streak for over a decade, putting him just below Robin Williams on the list of actors who need to be rescued from their own careers. A return to the role of Axel Foley, the detective/con man of Beverly Hills Cop, might be the best way to ensure that Norbit never happens again.

8. Jack Carter (Michael Caine), Get Carter

Michael Caine has made a major comeback in recent years, but in most of his recent roles — in Batman Begins, Children of Men,and The Prestige, for instance — he's played the Kindly Old British Guy. It's easy to forget that he made his name playing jerks — first a heartless cad in Alfie, then a brutal-but-suave thug in Get Carter. This story of a London gangster who travels to Newcastle (Britain's equivalent of South Jersey) to investigate his brother's murder isn't as flashy as more recent tales of the U.K. underworld. But Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham nevertheless owe everything to Get Carter's blueprint and Caine's cynical performance. A return to the character of Carter would give Caine a chance to recapture both the grim violence and the effortless sexiness of one of his greatest roles.

7. Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman), The French Connection

The most successful action film of the '70s didn't star Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee or any other established veteran of the genre. The French Connection owes much of its success to Gene Hackman's performance as hot-headed bad cop Popeye Doyle (which earned him his first Academy Award). More than just a tough guy, Doyle is a contemptible bully, and instead of an invincible supercop, his temper makes him a bit of a screw-up. Hackman is still more than capable of this kind of complexity (as proven by The Royal Tenenbaums), and it would be thrilling to see what he could do with this character after thirty-five years.

6. Foxy Brown (Pam Grier)

The 1973 film Coffy established Pam Grier as the undisputed queen of '70s blaxploitation. Foxy Brown (originally intended as a sequel entitled Burn, Coffy, Burn!) justified her ascension — whether infiltrating a high-end call-girl ring, shooting her drug-dealing brother in the ear, or hijacking a drug runner's crop duster, Foxy is "a whole lotta woman." At turns smiling and sneering, she violently opposes an oppressive society symbolized by a white-operated heroin syndicate. Grier has had a slightly higher profile since Quentin Tarantino reintroduced audiences to her charms, but it's been far too long since she's kicked ass like she did in Foxy Brown.

Read PART 2.